Deaf Firefighter’s Blog

As much as my job requires me to have a fairly decent grasp of English and putting words together to coherently express a thought I may be having, I still have those moments of “Aww, I shoulda said…”

You know those moments?  Moments when you’re just doing something completely different and WHAMMO!  The PERFECT response hits you like a ton of bricks?   Let’s call those the WHAMMO moments, shall we?

Here’s my personal WHAMMO moment that I feel compelled to blog about.

In the coming weeks (perhaps as early as tomorrow?), Philadelphia’s City Paper will do an article about the changes at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.  For some reason, I was recommended by some folks as being knowledgeable about the deaf community and deaf culture.  I tried to tell the guy that a) Those people are too kind, and b) There are others who could be better sources than I.  I guess when you’re on a deadline you run with what you have. I gotta hand it to this guy though. He asked really good questions and showed an better understanding of deaf culture than most reporters tend to.

He asked me the following question:

“How does Deaf culture couple the need to develop a strong deaf community with the need to integrate deaf students into the broader community at large?”

Good question.  It took most of my lunch and a few minutes while typing to really think my answer through. I was never really satisfied with how I ended the answer:

There are people within the community who think that the broader community should be integrating into US rather than vice versa.   In other words, we’ve spent 100+years trying to “integrate”, “mainstream”, etc. and where has it gotten us collectively?   Since that’s a failure, maybe we should focus solely on OUR culture, OUR language and OUR community before we think about everyone else’s.

There are others who think that we need to be constantly engaged with the larger society (read: hearing people) and may perceive efforts to maintain a distinct “culture” or “language” as being futile or a distraction from this goal.

I think there are a lot of Deaf people, myself included,  who fall in between the two.  They recognize and value their cultural and linguistic background but they recognize the reality where they may have to spend 8-10 hours a day integrating into the larger society for work and just being involved in the community they live in.  I do enjoy talking with my hearing neighbors but does that make me less of a deaf person?  By the same token, when I head out to the local watering hole, I usually bring deaf friends with me.

So back to my WHAMMO moment.  I was driving back from the store after getting milk and bread (how suburban) when I thought back to this exchange and realized how it should have ended:

The most successful deaf people are the ones who reject all of the above, decide their own path, and get it done. 

Take a look at our deaf “superstars” of today and you’ll see this repeating itself in their life stories. Yeh, Davila, Hawk, (god help me) Ridor’s early years, or <insert your role model here> and you’ll see that they’re not following some cultural playbook or following some preconcieved notion on what they should be doing.  They simply decided: This is what I want to do (and did it).